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Life after college is weird. This can help.

SEPT. 30, 2018

This is a guide for the first years after college, from career and personal finance advice to stories about creating the life you’ve always imagined and bouncing back when things don’t go quite the way you planned.

LifeAfter

College

IsWeird

This Can Help

Each year, almost two million people in the United States graduate from college. What comes next can be intimidating: finding a job, learning to cook, realizing how bad credit card debt can get. This is a guide for a graduate’s first years of freedom. Some of these stories are about the basic realities of career and personal finance. Others are about creating the life you’ve always imagined — or may just be beginning to imagine — and bouncing back when things don’t go right.

How to Get Your First Job

If you had an elephant, what would you do with it?

Once you land an interview, expect questions meant to throw you off. Finding the job you want — on your terms — comes down to having confidence (or acting like you do), knowing what to ask and owning up to what you don’t know.

So you can only afford to live in a shoe box. How to make it feel like a home.

Al Drago for The New York Times

You’ve scoured Craigslist. You’ve somehow coughed up the first, last and security deposit. And now you’ve unlocked the door to a tiny space with vast possibilities. Surround yourself with plants and skateboard in the living room. It’s your space.

You’re 22 and just got your first paycheck. You could blow it all or …

We all know we should be saving money, but who really wants to? Meet up with friends for drinks — you work hard. Buy those concert tickets — when’s that band coming back next? We think that if we save, we miss out. It doesn’t have to be that way.

My Tinder date lied. Was I the creep?

Dating profiles can border on fiction. People edit away their pimples and crop out their exes, making it hard to know what’s real and what’s fantasy. It’s why you should research your date, and stalking is O.K. That’s what I learned hunched over my laptop at 2 a.m., 26 browser tabs deep.

Cook Without Ramen

9 recipes with 5 ingredients (or fewer)*

Start simple, though remember, simple doesn’t have to mean tasteless or boring. Here are recipes from the NYT Cooking team to get you started. (*Assuming you have salt, pepper and maybe some olive oil.)

How to win your first three months on the job

You probably had internships or summer office jobs, but this is different. It’s the start of your career. Start by making a good first impression, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Pretty soon, you’ll be sitting in the boss’s chair, right?

I spent four years going into debt. Now, how do I get out?

It’s O.K. to mess up. We all do.

Broken friendships. Lost teeth. Missing documents. There’s no checklist for finding the right path. So we decided to offer a little solace with stories about people making mistakes in their 20s — and still mostly ending up on their feet.

I was a lawyer. Then I found my calling in the basement of a Mexican restaurant.

A writer for NBC’s “Superstore” quit his first real job to pursue a life of comedy. He was lucky. He made it. And he has some tips to help you decide when it’s time to pull the plug on a wretched career. (Just don’t forget that every job can still occasionally suck.)

Roth I.R.A.

A retirement account that’s often a great option for younger people with less income, particularly if their employers don’t offer anything. Here’s why: You contribute money that has already been taxed as part of your paycheck — and since younger people tend to earn less, they pay less in taxes on what they make. But the best part is that you don’t pay taxes later when you withdraw money for retirement. Federal rules on how much you can contribute are here.

Design and production by Gray Beltran, Jessie Schwartz and Eden Weingart.